Tischbein, on the other hand, merely
disliked and feared Vesuvius. He said it had no aesthetic value, and
at his one ascent did not accompany Goethe to the crater's edge. He
seems to have regarded Goethe's bravery as rashness. Here, you see, is
a rift, ever so slight, but of evil omen; what seismologists call `a
fault.'
Goethe was unconscious of its warning. Throughout his sojourn in
Naples he seems to have thought that Tischbein in Naples was the same
as Tischbein in Rome. Of some persons it is true that change of sky
works no change of soul. Oddly enough, Goethe reckoned himself among
the changeable. In one of his letters he calls himself `quite an
altered man,' and asserts that he is given over to `a sort of
intoxicated self-forgetfulness'--a condition to which his letters
testify not at all. In a later bulletin he is nearer the mark: `Were I
not impelled by the German spirit, and desire to learn and do rather
than to enjoy, I should tarry a little longer in this school of a
light-hearted and happy life, and try to profit by it still more.' A
truly priceless passage, this, with a solemnity transcending logic--as
who should say, `Were I not so thoroughly German, I should be
thoroughly German.' Tischbein was of less stern stuff, and it is clear
that Naples fostered in him a lightness which Rome had repressed.
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